Model Airplanes

Back in 2004, when aerial drones were still synonymous with Hellfire missiles and top-secret military missions, former U.S. Air Force medic Gene Robinson was looking for a way to change public perception. No longer able to fly a plane himself, Robinson designed the Spectra, an unmanned flying wing aircraft that can be remotely piloted in extreme weather conditions. More than a decade later, Robinson and his Spectra have been to 30 states and three countries. He’s helped break up a human trafficking ring in Tijuana, Mexico, and traveled nearly 7,000 miles away from his home in Wimberley to search for Genghis Khan’s tomb.

His home base is the Wimberley Volunteer Fire Department, an unassuming one-story building where Robinson also teaches others how to fly unmanned aircraft. When I met with him, he was working on restoring a donated emergency vehicle into a mobile command unit. In just two months, the 2012 Chevrolet ambulance had been outfitted with two printers, a 4K video monitor, and a piloting console to take his drone operations on the road.

Through his nonprofit, Remote Pilot (RP) Search Services, Robinson has flown nearly 1,000 search and rescue missions, including the high-profile search for Casey Anthony’s daughter in 2008. He’s quick to admit that he saw his first such mission as merely a marketing opportunity for the Spectra, but once he saw how the technology could help people, he never looked back.

“When we made our first find, the family was just so grateful,” Robinson said. “What we were able

Article source: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2018-11-23/the-life-of-a-search-and-rescue-drone-pioneer/

The first ever “solid state” plane, with no moving parts in its propulsion system, has successfully flown for a distance of 60 metres, proving that heavier-than-air flight is possible without jets or propellers.

The flight represents a breakthrough in “ionic wind” technology, which uses a powerful electric field to generate charged nitrogen ions, which are then expelled from the back of the aircraft, generating thrust.

Steven Barrett, an aeronautics professor at MIT and the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, said the inspiration for the project came straight from the science fiction of his childhood. “I was a big fan of Star Trek, and at that point I thought that the future looked like it should be planes that fly silently, with no moving parts – and maybe have a blue glow. But certainly no propellers or turbines or anything like that. So I started looking into what physics might make flight with no moving parts possible, and came across a concept known as the ionic wind, with was first investigated in the 1920s.

“This didn’t make much progress in that time. It was looked at again in the 1950s, and researchers concluded that it couldn’t work for aeroplanes. But I started looking into this and

Article source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/21/first-ever-plane-with-no-moving-parts-takes-flight

Since their invention more than 100 years ago, airplanes have been moved through the air by the spinning surfaces of propellers or turbines. But watching science fiction movies like the “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” and “Back to the Future” series, I imagined that the propulsion systems of the future would be silent and still – maybe with some kind of blue glow and “whoosh” noise, but no moving parts, and no stream of pollution pouring out the back.

That doesn’t exist yet, but there is at least one physical principle that could be promising. About nine years ago, I started investigating using ionic winds – flows of charged particles through the air – as a means of powering flight. Building on decades of research and experimentation by academics and hobbyists, professionals and high school science students, my research group recently flew a nearly silent airplane without any moving parts.

The plane weighed about five pounds (2.45 kilograms) and had a wingspan of 15 feet (5 meters), and traveled about 180 feet (60 meters), so it’s a long way from efficiently carrying cargo or people long distances. But we have proved that it is possible to fly a heavier-than-air vehicle using ionic winds. It even has a glow you can see in the dark.

Revisiting discarded research

The process our plane uses, formally called electroaerodynamic propulsion, was investigated as far back as the 1920s by an eccentric scientist who thought he had discovered anti-gravity – which was

Article source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/mit-flies-model-airplane-powered-electric-fields-and-ionic-winds-180970877/